State's shrinking glaciers: Going ... going ... gone?
MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK -- Like tiny doctors on the belly of a sleeping giant, three National Park Service workers trudged up the middle of the Nisqually Glacier, stepping over tiny creeks and peering down a dizzying chute where water from the melting glacier wormed into the 300-foot-thick slab of ice.
Nearby, a tall plastic pole arced from the ice into the sky. Park scientist Rebecca Doyle knelt at its base, whipped out a tape measure, and began jotting down numbers.
The pole is 41 feet long. Six months ago, in April, it was totally buried in snow and ice. On this recent sunny October day, so much snow had melted that only a few inches of the pole remained buried.
"Wow, that's a lot," exclaimed Paul Kennard, a park service geomorphologist, as he stood holding the pole.
Like Kennard and Doyle here on Mount Rainier, scientists on mountains all over Washington, the most glacier-covered state in the Lower 48, are trying to determine how glaciers are changing. What they are finding here and elsewhere is worrisome: Many of them, such as the South Cascade Glacier in the remote North Cascades, are shrinking quickly -- and some are on the verge of disappearing.
While glaciers have ebbed and flowed through the region for millennia -- the land where Seattle now stands was once beneath more than half a mile of ice -- scientists say global warming is at least partly to blame this time.
And it would be more than a sentimental loss. It could mean less water powering some of the region's hydroelectric dams, filling some drinking-water reservoirs, irrigating farm fields and ushering spawning salmon upstream.
"When people ask me, 'Will glaciers disappear in my lifetime?' I answer, 'Some of them will disappear; all of them are going to get a lot smaller,' " said Andrew Fountain, a glaciologist at Portland State University who is cataloging changes in U.S. glaciers.
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State's shrinking glaciers: Going ... going ... gone?
